If you want to rotate elements that lie above your camera preview view (SurfaceHolder), simply place a FrameLayout above the SurfaceHolder, place all your elements in that FrameLayout and call the Layout "MyScreen_ContentLayout". Done.

Hope that helped someone out, took me quite a while to get everything together.

UPD:
Not every xml in res/anim folder declares an animation. Some of them might declare Animators or LayoutAnimationControllers. Those are not Animations, thus they can't be loaded with the loadAnimation() call.

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It looks like the gridLayoutAnimation tag describes not a particular basic animation type but rather a GridLayoutAnimationController. So it can be loaded directly with AnimationUtils.loadAnimation() but rather should be set to a ViewGroup (a layout) throuh layoutAnimation property. If you still want to obtain the AnimationController instance in code, use AnimationUtils.loadLayoutAnimation() method: